Born in Santa Barbara, California, the 75-year-old cartoonist/animator/writer studied illustration at Art Center College of Art and Design. Floyd began his Disney career fresh out of art school, as an animator and in-betweener (an artist who creates intermediate frames for smooth transitions between two images). “I walked through the Buena Vista main gate back in 1956 … I was still in my twenties. This was Walt’s ‘magic factory’ and the place to be if you wanted to meet smart, talented, brilliant people. You could learn everything here – it was like a master class in animation, filmmaking, engineering, and design. And that’s exactly how many people learned their craft … they came here and just started doing it.”
Floyd worked on Disney animated classics like “Sleeping Beauty,” “101 Dalmatians,” and “The Sword in the Stone,” but had no interaction with Walt for almost 10 years. Out of the blue, he was told to work on “The Jungle Book” – as a writer! “It was weird working here and seeing Walt walk by. But when I was drafted into the story department got a chance to work with the boss. Being in meetings and story conferences with Walt was amazing … what better boss could you work for than Walt Disney? He could be scary and demanding, but that’s because he wanted the best. And that was the standard we had to meet. What better standard than the highest one possible?”
According to Floyd, meeting celebrities like Fess Parker (“Davy Crockett“), David Stollery (“Spin and Marty”), Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke was a privilege. “I was just a kid working on ‘Mary Poppins‘ in the early 60′s and one day this boisterous redhead came crashing through the door and down the hall. I remember thinking, ‘Who’s this very loud, pregnant woman?’” That woman was “practically perfect” Mary herself, Julie Andrews, who was pregnant with daughter Emma.
“Julie was only there for a meeting because Walt was willing to wait until she had the baby and was ready to return to work.” Almost a year later, Floyd attended the recording sessions where Julie, Dick Van Dyke, songwriters Robert and Richard Sherman, and musical director Irwin Kostal recorded the music for “Mary Poppins” on Stage A. “With musicals, the songs are recorded [with a full orchestra] first. Once that was done, the real work began – making the movie. Every stage on this lot was used to build sets because all the film’s exteriors were shot indoors for maximum control.”
“Mary Poppins” wasn’t Disney’s first foray into combining live action with animation – Floyd mentions the “Alice Comedies” and Virginia Davis. “I met Virginia years ago when we did a personal appearance in Kansas City. She was well into her 80s or 90s, and had worked for Walt as a child in the 1930s. Walt coaxed her family to move to Hollywood because he needed her to do the ‘Alice Comedies’ here. So she moved to work for Walt – imagine the stories she has to tell!”
He goes on to say that despite the limitations of 1940s technology, Walt’s early live-action/animated films (like “Song of the South”) were, “absolutely flawless! Ub Iwerks developed processes that were amazing. They used ‘optical composites’ and everything lined up perfectly … to the envy of every other studio in town.”
When Walt passed away in 1966, Disney films just weren’t the same … nor was the atmosphere around the Lot. Floyd remembers everyone felt “lost” without their beloved leader, and he left Disney to focus on other projects. He returned to Disney Publishing in the 1980′s when Greg Crosby wanted him to write Disney comics. “He couldn’t find anyone who understood the tone, approach, and humor. I thought it was the easiest thing in the world. My childhood was so infused with Disney that I just knew what the characters should do and say – it was like second nature.”
When Pixar began work on “Toy Story 2” and “Monsters Inc.,” it’s no surprise that Floyd’s talents were recruited once again. “Steve Jobs, like Walt Disney, is one of my heroes. He’s very demanding, wants things done his way, and settles for nothing less. Walt was very much that same kind of person. People marveled at everything that came out of his studio, be it a Theme Park, movie, book, whatever. Disney meant top quality – and everyone else followed.”
Which film’s his favorite? “That’s really tough because they all have a special place in your heart – it’s hard to pick. The reason ‘The Jungle Book’ stands out is because I worked on the film with Walt Disney – and that was one time and one time only. That was Walt’s last film … life was simple back in those days. All we had to do was keep Walt happy by making the movie he wanted. That’s all that mattered to me.”
Through five generations of management regimes, Floyd remains extremely humble about his accomplishments. “I’m an apprentice really … still learning how to animate, write, direct, and be a better musician. I’ve spent my life learning how to do things – just like Walt Disney. Up to his last days, Walt was always learning something new because everything fascinated him. It didn’t matter who you were or what you did, he wanted to know all about it. What a lesson for kids – an older man who’s so eager to learn. I find it inspiring.” These days, Floyd keeps artistically fit by writing and drawing daily, whether it’s for his current collaboration with Disney Publishing, his upcoming book, or pure practice. Talk about inspiring!
Michael Ray Charles was born in 1967 in Lafayette, Louisiana, and graduated from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1985. In college, he studied advertising design and illustration, eventually moving into painting, his preferred medium. Charles also received an MFA degree from the University of Houston in 1993.
His graphically styled paintings investigate racial stereotypes drawn from a history of American advertising, product packaging, billboards, radio jingles, and television commercials. Charles draws comparisons between Sambo, Mammy, and minstrel images of an earlier era and contemporary mass-media portrayals of black youths, celebrities, and athletes—images he sees as a constant in the American subconscious. “Stereotypes have evolved,” he notes. “I’m trying to deal with present and past stereotypes in the context of today’s society.” Caricatures of Black experience, such as Aunt Jemima, are represented in Charles’s work as ordinary depictions of blackness, yet are stripped of the benign aura that lends them an often unquestioned appearance of truth. “Aunt Jemima is just an image, but it almost automatically becomes a real person for many people, in their minds. But there’s a difference between these images and real humans.” In each of his paintings, notions of beauty, ugliness, nostalgia, and violence emerge and converge, reminding us that we cannot divorce ourselves from a past that has led us to where we are, who we have become, and how we are portrayed.
His paintings are not about people, they are about images. They are about the negative stereotypes that Blacks still buy into – the minstrel and the mammy-’ and how they are updated, and (hidden in new images). These images are about the racial stereotypes that white people created and perpetuate, rather than knowing Blacks as (elaborate) individual human beings. Charles says ‘that the negative images about Blacks are hiding throughout American culture, just below the surface, on TV sitcoms and cartoons of every vintage and in advertising and sports.’ He didn’t invent them, and he is not singlehandedly perpetuating them. The images that Michael Ray Charles paints are not to confuse people, he is not creating these stereotypes. He is trying to seek and create an understanding’ among all people.
Michael Ray Charles takes old tired images, and, like a surgeon, tries to expose the cancer within them, and like a doctor, the artist’s intent is to heal us by showing us our scabs. Michael Ray Charles is trying to express to the world for all people to understand that blacks are human beings, and don’t deserve being pigeonholed through images which play and still play a major role in society today.
Michael Ray Charles is filmed on location at his home and studio in Austin, Texas. Through his studies of advertising, the minstrel tradition, and blackface, Charles seeks to deconstruct and subvert images of blackness through painting. “I’ve been called a sellout. People question my blackness. A lot of people accuse me of perpetuating a stereotype,” he says. “I think there’s a fine line between perpetuating something and questioning something. And I like to get as close to it as possible.” Pointing out items from his collection of memorabilia, Charles traces the transformation of stereotypes in his work.
Today, Charles continues to exhibit in national and international venues. His work remains the subject of books, magazines, and newspaper articles and is included in many public and private collection. Currently, Charles is a Professor of Art in the department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin. He and his family reside in Austin, Texas.
Source: The Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Artcyclopedia.com, PBS, Ask Art and Art Net
Kerry James Marshall was born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, and was educated at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, from which he received a BFA, and an honorary doctorate in 1999. The subject matter of his paintings, installations, and public projects is often drawn from Black popular culture, and is rooted in the geography of his upbringing: “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central, Los Angeles near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That determined a lot of where my work was going to go,” says Marshall. In his “Souvenir” series of paintings and sculptures, he pays tribute to the Civil Rights movement with mammoth printing stamps featuring bold slogans of the era—Black Power!—and paintings of middle-class living rooms where ordinary Black citizens have become angels tending to a domestic order populated by the ghosts of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and other heroes of the 1960s.
Marshall creates a comic book for the twenty-first century, pitting ancient African sculptures come to life against a cyberspace elite that risks losing touch with traditional culture. Marshall’s work is based on a broad range of art-historical references, from Renaissance painting to black folk art, from El Greco to Charles White. A striking aspect of his paintings is the emphatically Black skin tone of his figures, a development the artist says emerged from an investigation into the invisibility of Blacks in America and the unnecessarily negative connotations associated with darkness. Marshall believes “you still have to earn your audience’s attention every time you make something.” The sheer beauty of his work speaks to an art that is simultaneously formally rigorous and socially engaged.
“I persist, trying to make pictures that inscribe Black existential realities without sacrificing a sense of majesty. I’m driven by a desire to meaningfully provoke others’ curiosity, to paint without cynicism. I still believe in mastery; in the service of imagination it can exceed the limitations of circumstance.”
— Kerry James Marshall
Source: PBS, Greg Kucera Galley, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Christies.com and Wikipedia
Dorothy Height marched alongside Martin Luther King and led the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years, was known for her determination and grace as well as her wry humor. She remained active and outspoken well into her 90s and often received rousing ovations at events around Washington, where she was easily recognizable in the bright, colorful hats she almost always wore.
In awarding the congressional medal, President George W. Bush noted that Height had met with every U.S. president since Eisenhower, and “she’s told every president what she thinks since Dwight David Eisenhower.”
Height was born in Richmond, Va., before women could vote and when blacks had few rights. Her family moved to the Pittsburgh area when she was 4. Distinguishing herself in the classroom, she was accepted to Barnard College but then turned away because the school already had reached its quota of two black women. She went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees from New York University.
As a teenager, Height marched in New York’s Times Square shouting, “Stop the lynching.” After earning her degrees, she became a leader of the Harlem YWCA and the United Christian Youth Movement of North America, where she pushed to prevent lynching, desegregate the armed forces and reform the criminal justice system.
She traveled to Holland and England as a U.S. delegate to youth and church conferences, and in 1938 was one of 10 young people chosen by Eleanor Roosevelt to spend a weekend at the first lady’s Hyde Park, N.Y., home preparing for a World Youth Conference at Vassar College.
One of Height’s sayings was, “If the time is not ripe, we have to ripen the time.” She liked to quote 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who said the three effective ways to fight for justice are to “agitate, agitate, agitate.”
In the 1950s and 1960s, she was the leading woman helping King and other activists orchestrate the civil rights movement, often reminding the men heading not to underestimate their female counterparts.
Height was on the platform at the Lincoln Memorial, sitting only a few feet from King, when he gave his famous “I have a dream” speech at the March on Washington in 1963.
“He spoke longer than he was supposed to speak,” Height recalled in a 1997 Associated Press interview. But after he was done, it was clear King’s speech would echo for generations, she said, “because it gripped everybody.”
She lamented that the feeling of unity created by the 1963 march had faded, that the civil rights movement of the 1990s was on the defensive and many black families still were not economically secure.
“We have come a long way, but too many people are not better off,” she said. “This is my life’s work. It is not a job.”
When Obama won the presidential election in November 2008, Height told Washington TV station WTTG that she was overwhelmed with emotion.
“People ask me, did I ever dream it would happen, and I said, ‘If you didn’t have the dream, you couldn’t have worked on it,” she said.
Height dedicated most of her adult life to the National Council of Negro Women, where she first worked under her mentor, Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded the group. Height took over in 1957 and led it until 1997, fighting for women’s rights on issues such as equal pay and education. She developed programs such as “pig banks” to help poor rural families raise their own livestock, and “Wednesdays in Mississippi,” in which black and white women from the north traveled to Mississippi to meet with their Southern counterparts in an effort to ease racial tensions and bridge differences.
To celebrate Height’s 90th birthday in March 2002, friends and supporters raised $5 million to enable her organization to pay off the mortgage on its Washington headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, just a few blocks from the White House. Herman said Height “believed very strongly that we as black women deserved to be on this corridor of power.”
Dorothy Height, a leading civil rights pioneer of the 1960s, died Tuesday April 20, 2010 at age 98, Howard University Hospital confirmed.
Source: Associated Press
Until recently, there were few Black actors in a ever shrinking white-dominated society who were not faced with difficult choices and obstacles. The Bahamas-born Calvin Lockhart, who has died in 2007 was no exception. The handsome, charismatic Lockhart, who had classical acting training and who spoke French, German, Italian and Spanish, was mainly forced to take roles that he disliked.
At the start of the 1970s, more than two decades after the birth of the modern civil rights movement, Black Americans wanted a more positive media image of themselves. However, hollywood had other intentions so Blacks had to settle for broad comedies and slick thrillers, labelled “blaxploitation”. These films became more formulaic as the 1970s progressed – most of them were either “private detective takes on the mob” or “dealer becomes king of the pimps”.
Nevertheless, whatever the quality of the blaxploitation movies, they were directed by Black directors and starred Black actors, playing characters not seen from a white perspective. Lockhart appeared in one of the first Black – as distinct from noir – thrillers, Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), directed by Ossie Davis. He was the swindler-cum-preacher Reverend Deke O’Malley, who has conned $87,000 from the “good folks” for his phony Back to Africa movement.
Lockhart played suave gangsters called Silky Slim and Biggie Smalls respectively in Sidney Poitier’s Uptown Saturday Night (1974) and Let’s Do It Again (1975). At least, Melinda (1972), directed by Hugh Robertson, the first Black editor to be nominated for an Oscar, gave Lockhart the chance to play a super-hero, an egotistic disc jockey who has to take on the mobsters who had murdered his girlfriend.
In the same year, Lockhart was invited to join the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, where he appeared in several plays, notably Buzz Goodbody’s production of Titus Andronicus in which, as Aaron the Moor, he asks “is Black so base a hue?” and launches into a defence of his colour.
Lockhart had already spent almost five years in England (1965-1970), where he had appeared in TV dramas, such as the Wednesday Play and five British films in 1968: A Dandy in Aspic, The Mercenaries, Only When I Larf, Nobody Runs Forever and Joanna. In the last, directed by Mike Sarne, which also featured Donald Sutherland as a dying English aristocrat, Lockhart, as a nightclub owner was one of the first actors to dent a cinematic taboo with a Black-white love scene with the heroine, Genevieve Waite.
Sarne then cast him as the effete Irving Amadeus in the disastrous Myra Breckinridge (1970), and he played a pimp in John Boorman’s Leo the Last (1970), before returning to the US to star in Halls of Anger, (also 1970). The setting of this was an all-Black blackboard jungle which, because of the national integration plan, has to accept 60 white students who suffer the kind of racism that usually affects black people. However, Lockhart, cast as a teacher, solves all the school’s problems by his liberal approach. Despite the theme he disliked making the film and walked off the set more than once.
Lockhart, born Bert Cooper, the youngest of eight children, had left the Bahamas aged 19 to study engineering at New York, but became involved in a YMCA theatre group, and studied with the legendary drama coach Uta Hagen. He made his Broadway debut, taking over from Billy Dee Williams, in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, in the role of the sailor who gets the white girl (Joan Plowright) pregnant.
During his second stay in England, Lockhart was given one of his best film roles in The Beast Must Die (1974) as the millionaire owner of a country estate where he has gathered a number of people, one of whom he hopes to reveal as a werewolf. It was enjoyable, camp nonsense, but it did feature a rich, successful Black man, whose colour is never mentioned, a rare phenomenon in films of the early 1970s. Another potentially interesting part was in The Baron (1977), where Lockhart played a struggling Black film-maker who turns to the underworld to raise money. However, the film descended into many of the cliches of blaxploitation gangster movies.
A couple of years later, Lockhart suffered a heart attack brought on by the news that his son from a former marriage (he was married four times) had lost the use of his legs from jumping under a train. But he returned to work, albeit in a minor capacity. He was in seven episodes as Jonathan Lake in TV’s Dynasty (1985-86), was the head of a Jamaican voodoo-gang in Predator 2 (1990), and had small roles in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) and Twin Peaks (1992).
In 1979, Calvin met Jennifer Miles in New York, and they had a son in 1981. They married in 2006: she survives him, as do his other two sons and a daughter.
Contributor: Ronald Bergan
* Cotton Comes to Harlem, Uptown Saturday Night, Let’s Do it Again, The Beast Must Die and Melinda Movie Posters are a part of the Collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk.
The Museum of UnCut Funk celebrates the movie poster art of John Solie. John’s legendary skill for depicting “dead-on likenesses” of famous people has kept him in demand by major Hollywood movie studios, television networks, book publishers and magazine editors. He has created over two hundred movie posters and painted Blaxploitation movie stars such as Trina Parks, Billy Dee Williams, Jeanne Bell, Richard Roundtree and Jimmy Cliff for movies such as DarkTown Strutters, Blast, TNT Jackson, the Shaft sequals and The Harder They Come.
John’s work spans much farther than Hollywood. As a talented sculptor as well as illustrator and portrait artist, John was commissioned by CBS Television Network to create a bronze sculpture of “the most trusted man in America,” Mr. Walter Cronkite, which is on display in the lobby of the CBS Building in New York.
Solie is a proud member of the NASA Art Team and has paintings on display at the Kennedy Space Center and Johnson Space Center.
The Museum of UnCut Funk salutes John Solie and his many achievements and his contributions to one of the most exciting times in Black film history.
Thalmus Rasulala was born Jack Chowder on November 15th, 1939. One of the many Black actors from the 1970’s and beyond who never got his rightful due, Thalmus will always be at the top of my list of great performers. He amassed a wealth of television, film, directing and other credits, including winning a Theatre World Award for his role in the Broadway production of “Hello Dolly” with Pearl Bailey and an all Black cast.
Thalmus was a man among men, known for his roles from the height of the 1970’s Blaxploitation explosion. In 1972, he portrayed Dr. Gordon Thomas in Blacula, a widely successful film that mixed horror and gore with the excitement of blaxploitation.
In 1972, he also played Sidney Lord James, the lead character in Cool Breeze, a remake of The Asphalt Jungle with an all Black cast. In this film, James is an ex-convict who plans to steal $3 million worth of jewels, sell them, and use the money to start a bank to back Black businesses. He is assisted by two pals, his half-brother and a preacher who also works as a thief. The operation is ultimately backed by a man who cheats on his wheelchair-bound wife with a sexy woman.
In 1973, Thalmus starred in one of the best classic pimp movies ever, Willie Dynamite. In this movie Thalmus played Robert Daniels, the D.A.
The Slams is a violent prison drama from 1973, in which an imprisoned criminal finds himself flooded with offers to spring him if he reveals the secret location of the $1.5 million he stole from the mob before he went to jail. Thalmus is credited as the Assistant Director on this flick.
In 1975, Thalmus played the role of Charlie the grocery store owner in Cornbread, Earl and Me. Cornbread, a Black kid who strives to escape his ghetto surroundings. He does so by becoming a high school basketball star–and the idol of the other youngsters in his community. On the verge of starting college on a scholarship, Cornbread is mistakenly killed by a police officer.
In 1975, Thalmus also starred opposite Pam Grier in Friday Foster. Thalmus plays Blake Tarr, the richest Black man in America. Grier plays Friday Foster, a freelance photographer with an insatiable thirst for adventure. In her assignment to photograph Tarr, Friday unearths a conspiracy to assassinate him.
In 1975, Thalmus starred again with Pam Grier and Fred Williamson in Bucktown. This film is about a man named Duke Johnson, played by Williamson, who moves to a small and racially divided southern town where his nightclub owning brother was murdered after he refused to pay crooked white cops for “protection.” When he is threatened himself, he calls in some of his buddies, one of whom is played by Thalmus named Roy, to help him. When the friends decide to take over the town, Johnson becomes a one-man army on a mission to oust the baddies.
In 1975, Thalmus starred with Dean Martin in Mr. Ricco. In this obscure drama, Martin, a San Francisco lawyer defends Black militant Frankie Steele, played by Thamlus, who is on trial for murdering a cop.
He was also a special guest on the 1975 episode of ‘Saturday Night Live’ hosted by Richard Pryor. They did a great ‘Exorcist’ parody with Thalmus as Father Merrin and Pryor as Father Karras. The priests dished out some intense discipline to Regan (played by Laraine Newman) when she started bad mouthing their mammas.
In 1976, Thalmus’ went on to land a role in Alex Haley’s Roots as Kunta Kinte’s father Omro. In 1977, he played Dr. Alvarez in Killer On Board with Patty Duke, George Hamilton and Jane Seymour.
Other notable film and television credits include:
1974 – The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman – Ned
1976 – 1977 – Played Bill Thomas (Mabel King’s ex) on several episodes of ‘What’s Happening?
1976 – Adios Amigo – Noah
1978 – The President’s Mistress – Lt. Gordon
1979 – The Bermuda Triangle – Coast Guard Officer
1981 – The Sophisticated Gents – Snake
1884 – The Jerk Too – Crossroads
1986 – The Defiant Ones - Fred
1986 – The Boss’ Wife – Barney
1988 – Steven Segal’s Above the Law – Deputy Supt. Crowder
1989 – The Preppie Murder
1989 – Trekkies probably recognize him as Capt. Donald Varley on the ‘Contagion’ episode of ‘The Next Generation.
1990 – Lambada – Wesley Wilson
1991 – He was the police commissioner in New Jack City, and played Jack Chowder
His final film role was in 1992 as General Afir in Mom and Dad Save the World, which was released posthumously
Thalmus Rashlala died of a massive heart attack in Albuquerque NM on October 9th 1991. He was only 52. He was survived by his wife Sherilyn and four children.
Source: Wikipedia, IMDB, Answers.com and Racks and Razors
